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What makes a truly great live musical performance? Most people would say it's the subtle, spontaneous changes in tone and tempo that convey emotion and creativity. Most people, as it turns out, would be wrong. That, at least, is the conclusion of a researcher at University College London who studied people's evaluations of classical musicians performing during competitions.

Both experts and novices alike were given clips from performances at a musical competition and promised $8 if they could accurately guess the winner based on the clips. Across all the experiments, those given the chance to view muted, video-only clips from the competition consistently performed the best when asked to identify the winner.

This is a bit of a surprise, given how much most of us consider music to be an auditory experience. But as the study's author, Chia-Jung Tsay, notes, "people can lack insight into their own preferences and cognitive processes." She considered it possible that we actually overvalue the audible portion of a performance simply because we believe that's what we're evaluating.

In her study, Tsay obtained complete audio and video recordings of 10 different classical music competitions, each of which featured three different finalists. At the end of each competition, a panel of expert judges had chosen a winner based on these performances. Tsay then divided these up into shorter clips, some of which featured audio, some video, and others both. She then recruited a large panel of volunteers (some of them professional musicians) who, as we already noted, were promised $8 if they could identify the performance that won the competition.

Going in, most people predicted that the audio recording would provide the clearest means of identifying the winner—in fact, she noted that the pros who were given visual-only clips sometimes mentioned that they expected they'd be completely incapable of identifying the winner. Novices were given the option of paying $2 to get the full clips or were given either audio-only or visual-only clips for free. Sixty percent chose the sound-only, while another 25 percent chose to pay $2 to have the full performance.

When given the full performance, the novices performed about as well as the experts—and that turned out to be not well at all. With only three clips, they'd be expected to choose the winner a third of the time due to random chance alone. With the full performance, they only managed to guess correctly 35 percent of the time. Those who were given audio-only clips did even worse, getting it right 29 percent of the time.

But the surprise came from those given only visual clips. They got it right 46 percent of the time.

Pros generated similar numbers. Although the number of participants was small and the precise numbers varied from experiment to experiment, having the full audio and visual performance left everyone near random chance when it came to guessing the winner; those with audio-only clips did worse, while those with video of the performance did better. When novices were given either audio-only or visual-only clips, the ones given the visuals doubled the accuracy of the people who were stuck with only sound.

How could visual information count for so much of a musical performance? Tsay looked at this in a couple of different ways. To get at the performer's movements, she applied an image filter that turned the clips into a black-and-white cartoon in which everything but the outlines of the performer and instrument was faded to white. Even a six-second clip of this modified silent video was enough to allow people to guess the winner at a rate well above chance. So the motion of the performer appears to be enough to convey something significant about the performance.

What's it conveying? Participants were shown silent clips and asked to rate the performance on a variety of factors, such as passion and creativity. High ratings for a number of factors—passion, involvement, motivation, creativity, and uniqueness—were all associated with an improved chance of picking the contest winners. (It seems notable that all of these factors are very subjective and difficult to define.)

Tsay suggests that the emphasis on visuals comes because a musical performance provides a lot to take in, placing a significant burden on our cognitive resources. Given the option of focusing on any sensory input, most people default to the visuals. The focus on visuals is something that happens in a variety of contexts, so it shouldn't be a surprise that novice musicians do it. What is somewhat surprising, according to the paper, is that it happens with the pros, too: "It is unsettling to find—and for musicians not to know—that they themselves relegate the sound of music to the role of noise."